Sometimes you have to take an argument to its logical conclusion to see its flaws.
I'd guess, for example, that 95 percent of Minnesotans would oppose redefining our marriage laws to include temporary marriages, where the partners' marriage certificate includes an end date; marriages of three or more people (say, two lesbians rearing their child with a gay male sperm donor), or marriages between siblings in a nonsexual relationship.
Yet how would such marriages hurt anyone else's marriage? If the individuals in question love and care for each other, isn't that all marriage is about? Doesn't love make a family? Don't people bound by affection deserve the benefits of marriage -- and suffer stigma if these are withheld? If you disagree, aren't you discriminating against others' "fundamental right" to marry as they wish?
These questions are, of course, the same as those posed by same-sex marriage advocates to fellow Minnesotans who support preserving one-man/one-woman marriage in our state Constitution.
If you think the marital forms just described are fantasy, you should know that some very smart people are telling us that promotion of such arrangements is the logical next step in the marriage debate. These individuals made their case in a 2006 statement entitled "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage," whose signers include Gloria Steinem; Princeton University's Cornel West, and hundreds of other lawyers, writers and scholars from some of our nation's most prestigious universities.
Why do the marriage permutations they describe strike most of us as inappropriate, just as the marriage of two men or two women did until a few years ago? The reason is that marriage has a unique public purpose, which distinguishes it from all other human relationships, no matter how valuable they may be to the people involved.
Marriage has always and everywhere been a male/female institution because it is rooted in biology and human ecology. Across the globe and through the millennia, its public purpose has been the same: To connect men with their children and the mother who bore them, so that every child has a loving, committed mother and father.
Though the best environment for raising children is a married mother and father, the power and inconstancy of human sexual attractions make this hard to achieve. Marriage brings social norms and pressures to bear to create a socially supported framework to ensure stable unions -- thereby forming the next generation and promoting the common good.
